Voices From the Archive: Robert Boyd on TCJ and the Mainstream

Robert Boyd an editor of The Comics Journal, wrote in HU comments about why TCJ was so anti-superhero while he was there.

I was at TCJ in the early 90s and I guess I represented the POV that you speak of as well as anyone. I loathed mainstream comics. I made serious efforts to read the ones people said were good, like Animal Man, and found them terrible. For the most part, I still hate mainstream superhero comics. Gary can answer why he thought about them they way he did, but I think a lot of it was political–they were assembly line product produced by uncaring corporations. But my main complaint was that they weren’t interesting to me. (Obviously I could go deeper than this, but my interest level isn’t all that high…)

But here’s one thing that you have to remember–just how freaking dominant superhero comics were–in sales, of course, but also in visibility. Going to a comic convention was painful–and the certainly was nothing like SPX or TCAF back then. Wizard celebrated the worst artistic values imaginable and was he single largest comics publication (it outsold the comics it covered!) there was a general feeling in the office that they had their media, their conventions, their movies, their stores, etc. TCJ would be for “us”–and it felt like it was the only thing for us.

As someone interested in non-superhero comics, I feel like there is an infrastructure that I can tap into to enhance my enjoyment of these books. I can easily read reviews of just about any comic I want to. I can go to the Brooklyn Comix & Graphics Festival., etc. but in the early 90s, TCJ was my life raft. (one that amazingly helped pay my salary.)

If a reader didn’t like the editorial position of the Journal, I can understand. After all, magazines can’t be all things to all people. But the accusation of forming a clique seems silly. Let’s say the Comics Journal did cover superhero comics in the early 90s in a more inclusive way. Could you then say that it was ignoring newspaper strips. And if it included newspaper strips, couldn’t it be blames for not covering Japanese and European and Latin American comics more closely? And if it covered them, how can you excuse it for not covering other art forms–instead of just catering to the comics clique. In short, a magazine has to have some kind of focus. Non-mainstream comics was our focus.

Instead of clique, consider the words “constituency” or “market segment.” Magazines have an idea of their ideal reader, and this ideal reader evolves over time. Under editors Greg Baisden, Helena Harvilicz and Frank Young, that ideal reader was someone who had little interest in (and even antipathy for) superheroes. It was someone who liked the comics that were bubbling up from below, from the Xerox machines of the nation (which is why I started my column “Minimalism”). It was a reader who was looking for a new history of comics that was a counter to the then prevailing superhero-centric notion of comics history = “Golden Age” to “Silver Age” to “Bronze Age”. We weren’t totally consistent, and the hostility expressed towards Superhero comics was over-the-top, but since hardly anyone was paying attention to the kinds of comics we LOVED, we felt justified in making them our near-exclusive focus. If in doing so, we were shutting out the super-hero fans, so what–99% of the comics industry was devoted to catering to their tastes already. They had loudly and repeatedly proclaimed they didn’t need the Journal–or alternative comics.

Indeed, the basic feeling of the entire American industry at the time–the shops, the conventions, the distributors, the fan magazines, and most of the fans themselves–was a desire to see us (the people who read and produced and wrote about alternative comics) just go away. Larry Reid had a word for the comics stores that supported us–”The Fantagraphics 50.” Our existence as a publisher and the existence of the comics we liked was utterly precarious and dependent on the Direct Markets stores that for the most part loathed anything remotely alternative(there was no bookstore distribution at that time, really).

There are two ways to deal with that kind of environment. One is the MLK integrationist approach, and the other is the Malcolm X separatist approach. For a relatively few years (the time I was there before Spurge joined up), we went the Malcolm X route. It may have been a mistake, but our feeling was that we didn’t want to join a club full of people who hated our guts.

And in our clumsy way, we published a magazine for people who felt utterly alienated from the mainstream-superhero world. I can’t speak for everyone involved in the Journal at the time, but I think it was a necessary move. We had to build up this alternative art history of comics and stake a claim for all the cartoonists working outside the ridiculous conventions of the mainstream. It lead us into a somewhat extreme position (temporarily, I’d argue), but it helped give space for a lot of non-mainstream talents to develop and receive attention.

The original post by Robert Stanley Martin is here. Robert Boyd’s website is here.

My ire with TCJ for their embrace of an anti-superhero editorial stance was probably fueled by a sense of betrayal. After all, I was one of their earliest supporters and subscribers. In fact, I bought a second subscription for a comics buddy of mine who was low on cash — just so I could help Groth and company a little bit more.

And the TCJ leadership assumption (reiterated above by Boyd) that those who followed superhero comics wanted nothing to do with alternative comics, was horseshit — at least it was in my case. I was always a big fan of fanzines, undergrounds, alternative comics, small press, newave, minicomics, or whatever the nomenclature or sub-genre classification du jour was.

So when TCJ started becoming more and more exclusionary towards traditional fanzines and/or superhero fare, their growing elitism began to tick me off. It was as if they were saying to the superhero-friendly folks who help build their empire, “Screw you all… we don’t need you anymore. Go over to ‘Wizard’ magazine, where you belong.”

Well I never liked “Wizard,” never subscribed to it, and never felt it was “my” type of magazine. So getting summarily lumped in with their readership by the TCJ crowd was not just frustrating, it hurt.

Some people actually rightly believe that the comics medium can support a whole range of content other than superheroes, a mainly American preoccupation of pulp comics publishing that is directed towards children. Perhaps the editors just outgrew their focus on superheroes, something they probably assumed their readership would also. Little did they know that some never would….and now this odd underwear fetishism is bringing down the film industry as well. Bummer

James wrote: “Perhaps the editors just outgrew their focus on superheroes, something they probably assumed their readership would also.”

One could use that same “odd fetishism” argument for anthropomorphism comics like Dalgoda, Usagi Yojimbo, Maus, Cerebus, Krazy Kat, Mickey Mouse and Pogo — all of which TCJ has embraced or enthusiastically published.

Or one could also just as easily argue that TCJ never “outgrew” their focus on comic strips about pre-teen children, such as Little Nemo, Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, Little Lulu, Nancy, and Little Orphan Annie.

The fact is, the folks at TCJ are the one’s who arbitrarily shrank their comics tent to exclude superheroes — despite the fact that it makes no rational sense to do so.

Back in the 1970s, when TCJ started, true comics aficionados embraced the best all kinds of comics.

Russ, Maus and Krazy Kat are adult strips, perhaps Peanuts as well. I am not quite so enamored of Nancy and the work of John Stanley, Carl Barks and Walt Kelly as many are—and I was shocked that the poll of greatest comics ever here on HU was won by Calvin and Hobbes. I mean, all this stuff is fine, even good, but it doesn’t make my heart beat faster. But unfortunately, the adventure-based styles I do relate to have been poisoned by their association with superheroes, which I could not be less interested in.

Just a general comment, Noah: I very much like this new ‘Voices from the Archives’ feature.
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Aye!

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R. Maheras says:

…One could use that same “odd fetishism” argument for anthropomorphism comics like Dalgoda, Usagi Yojimbo, Maus, Cerebus, Krazy Kat, Mickey Mouse and Pogo — all of which TCJ has embraced or enthusiastically published.
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Yes. None of which — except for “Maus,” which I admired more than enjoyed — ever did a thing for me, whatever quality some had…

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Back in the 1970s, when TCJ started, true comics aficionados embraced the best all kinds of comics.
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Even the late, deleted TCJ message board regularly featured folks raving over some excellent superhero comics that came along!

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James says:

…I was shocked that the poll of greatest comics ever here on HU was won by Calvin and Hobbes.
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James — I said Maus and Krazy Kat were anthropomorphic strips — not children’s strips.

You wrote: “But unfortunately, the adventure-based styles I do relate to have been poisoned by their association with superheroes, which I could not be less interested in.”

That’s fine. You don’t like superheroes. That doesn’t mean other rational adult people can’t enjoy them.

Personally, manga has never interested me much except for a relatively few strips that had terrific art — Akira, for example, which I was admiring during the mid-1980s in Japan before anyone in the U.S. had ever heard of it. And while I’ve never really understood the huge demand that manga suddenly developed in the U.S. during the 1990s and 2000s, I didn’t stick my nose up at those who enjoyed the stuff.

Since I kicked all of this off, I should probably weigh in a bit, although I’m repeating what I wrote before. The problem wasn’t so much the exclusionary pull-back from contemporary adventure comics as it was the magazine’s doing that while presenting itself as a generalist publication. If you’re going to bill yourself as “The Magazine of Comics News and Criticism” on the covers and reinforce that with a news section that does take a generalist tack, the features sections need to cover the whole field as well. The coverage of newspaper strips, editorial cartooning, and magazine cartooning left a lot to be desired, too. (The first manga wave hit the U. S. in the late 1980s, and that was completely ignored.) There’s a lot more to comics than the U.S. indy scene, European translations, and classic reprints. The Journal devoted its features coverage to the areas of comics that Fantagraphics was a part of as a publisher.

Frankly Russ, I turn up my nose at superheroes because they are jammed up my nose so much while their fans ignore or defend the rotten companies that profit by this crap. All artists that draw “realistically” in comics end up tarred with the superhero brush because American comics are corrupted by them so totally. The Kirby work I prefer is that which is as far away from superheroes as possible. I’ve noticed that you most often support the slimy corporate position that fucked him over. The only thing I agree with you on is that Caniff was great but we don’t coincide on why. And BTW Manga is a format….Akira is an adventure SF comic.

James — Regarding manga as a format, we actually sort of agree on this (or at least we used to). The problem is, the original name for the format has morphed in our lexicon to a more generic term that identifies Japanese comics featuring big-eyed characters drawn in a certain style.

This also happened with the term “minicomics.” Back in the mid-1980s, the term “minicomic” identified a specific format, i.e., a sheet of typing paper folded into quarters and trimmed. A “microminicomic” was a sheet of typing paper folded in eighths and trimmed; and a “digest comic” was a comic consisting of a sheet (or sheets) of typing paper folded in half. However, today, “minicomic” is a generic term for ANY self-published comic.

“Manga” is going that same route, which is why “How to Draw Manga Style” books have popped up in the past few years.

I forgot whose law it as that 99% of everything sucks. But I hate to live by that rule. I think everyone who does comics has to work very hard indeed. At least everyone who draws them does. Often now these things take two minutes to read because some of the clowns writing them have made it so there’s only ten words on any given page. I could name names but one would hope they know who they are. Nowadays some of the writers have gotten greedy and want more than half the credit, which makes them look like big time jerks in my book. We artists were always willing to take half the kudos and half the blame but there’s a limit. That trend started with credit hog Stan Lee and then went into overdrive at Vertigo with guys like Gaiman, Azzarrello, Milligan. I was dealing with Vertigo for a while but no more—for that reason, and because the idiots running the companies are driving the comics publishing business into the mud and the lame-os in promo only promote the superhero crap.
So, there’s nothing wrong with the medium, there is something wrong with the people running the companies and making the priorities of how it is put out there. TCJ and Fantagraphics in general seem to me to be part of the solution, they do some of the best collections of the good old stuff and have led the way on the new.

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The first written reference to the adage appears in the March 1958 issue of Venture, where [SF writer Theodore] Sturgeon wrote:

I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud. Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. are crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms.
—————————–http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_Law

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But I hate to live by that rule.
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Being both a talented creator and quality-minded reader, you don’t have to!

And just so you all don’t think me a hypocrite, I think the majority of my own writing or drawing creative output sucks. In fact, there’s stuff I wrote and/or drew in the past whose Reek Factor is so off the charts, it makes me wince. Not surprisingly, I’ve shredded many a piece of original art without shedding a tear.

Well, you’re like Toth in that way, Russ. In fact that’s why he was so good—-because he wasn’t afraid to be self-critical and try and try again, harder and harder each time. Read his critiques of himself on Tothfans, he meant them…he really would have done them differently if he had his druthers and I always see what he means. Some of our other favorites were like that as well. Kirby didn’t look at his old books after they were printed, that’s why he’d get the costumes wrong the next time he drew them. Any artist worth their salt is very hard on their own stuff. When I look at what I’ve done I most often kick myself for not paying more attention. If you are a growing individual, your best work is always in front of you, not behind.

90% of all invocations of Sturgeon’s law are crap. But then, so are 90% of snarky blog comments.

Anyway, on overweening writers: those who closely follow the evolving design of Marvel’s reprints — and if that doesn’t include you, why not?? — may have noticed that lots of them now include the writer’s name in the title, as in e.g. “Ultimate Comics Ultimates by Jonathan Hickman Vol. 1”. But not the artists’ names, natch. Thus continues the origin myth of American comics: product springs forth fully-formed from the brow of Zeus or, as the case may be, Judd Winick or Kevin Smith or whoever.

“If you’re going to bill yourself as “The Magazine of Comics News and Criticism” on the covers and reinforce that with a news section that does take a generalist tack, the features sections need to cover the whole field as well.”

I feel a little weird defending editorial decisions from 20 years ago, but I just don’t understand this argument. Magazines have editorial missions that are usually narrower than their titles. Art in America doesn’t cover all art that exists in America. Car & Driver doesn’t cover every aspect of the automotive world. New York doesn’t have much Staten island coverage, last time I checked. Neither does The New Yorker. I believe that elementary school sports get something of a short shrift in Sports Illustrated. Newsweek chooses not to cover a huge amount of news every week. The vast majority of nice homes and lovely gardens will never be in the pages of Better Homes & Gardens. I could go on and on. This argument is silly.

What you seem to be saying is that for a period of time, The Comics Journal didn’t cover comics you wanted them to cover–or more important, comics you think they should have covered. That we were slow to pick up on Sandman and some other Vertigo stuff is pretty undeniable. These were discussions we had internally. We had limited space in the magazine, but as has been pointed out before, we could have lost Ken Smith and most of the letters column responses (both of these were goals of editors at various times) and freed up tons of space. But generally, we covered the stuff that was most important to us. And our feeling was that mainstream superhero comics had plenty of coverage elsewhere. I thought at the time that it was much more important for us to cover minicomics than to cover Batman. And I still do.

I also feel a little odd criticizing two-decade-old editorial decisions. All this started as a comment thread dealing with the contemporary aesthetic atmosphere in the comics scene. But discussions take on a life of their own, and this is where it has taken us.

Obviously choices have to be made in coverage. But Art in America is all but certainly going to provide review coverage of the latest showcase exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art or the New York Met. And so on. For the comics and cartooning world of the early 1990s, the equivalent is review coverage of work such as Todd McFarlane’s Spider-Man, the latest collection of Lynn Johnston’s For Better or for Worse, and the most recent compilation of Roz Chast’s work for The New Yorker. TCJ didn’t come close to providing any of that.

Just because Time is doing an article on, say, a Jeff Koons exhibition at MoMA, that doesn’t mean Art in America isn’t obliged to do one, too. I wouldn’t fault the AiA editors for thinking Koons’ work is laughable crap–I certainly do, and so do many others–but I would fault them for not giving coverage to such a high-profile undertaking. And if they fail to cover things like that over and over again in favor of coverage of shows at every little private gallery in Brooklyn, including a few in which the publisher has a proprietary interest, there’s a point where you have to say the magazine is unreasonably exclusionary in its attitudes.

I think the issue is maybe that TCJ often saw itself as more of an advocate than a generalist publication? I think it went back and forth to some extent, but it always had a polemical edge.

I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. It kind of won the argument though, which has presented a new set of problems….

Robert, it seems like you should be happier with the editorial focus of the current tcj? They tend to cover big events fairly thoroughly, and they have a fair bit of mainstream coverage, just in general and especially with Tucker over there now….

Robert wrote: “And our feeling was that mainstream superhero comics had plenty of coverage elsewhere. I thought at the time that it was much more important for us to cover minicomics than to cover Batman.”

I absolutely have no problem with such an editorial decision, as I’ve made similar decisions myself.

My problem was not lack over coverage for superhero stuff, it was TCJ’s ever-growing open derision and editorial snarkiness towards such material that just a few years earlier had been treated with relative even-handedness.

About 10 years ago, someone at TCJ wrote a scathing critique of the creators in Artists Alley at Wizard World Chicago. He lumped all of them together and chastized the bunch for being the type of creators “Wizard” catered to: superhero creator wannabes.

Well, I was at that particular show, and aside from the fact that he was was being unfair lumping together what was actually a diverse bunch of creators, I took exception with his attack on the people there who were simply trying to channel their love of creating comics into a paying career with one of the mainstream comics publishers.

That print attack was the proverbial straw for me and I wrote a rant letter to TCJ about their long-standing anti-superhero stance. They gamely printed it, but the resulting response to the letter was actually pretty lame — mainly because what I wrote was absolutely true.

I’ve probably read about 90% of TCJ’s print run (I even have the first Groth issue!), and I have to say that the Boyd/Baisden/Harvilicz/Young era is my all-time favorite. Fiore vs. Crumb, Fiore vs. Pekar, “Todd Loren: First Amendment Advocate or Lying Sack of Shit?,” the Ripper controversy, Vietnam comics, “The ‘Sincerely, Marc S. Tucker’ Open,” Sex in Comics, Alan Moore and Crumb interviewed over and over… I love all that stuff. Part of the magazine’s late-80s/early-90s spirit was probably due to its excitement about the first wave of alternative comics–people who had spent the last several years bitching about and analyzing superhero comics ad nauseum finally had something to sink their teeth into.

Jack — I was heavily involved with the small press movement of the 1980s, and yes, the self-publishing boom from that period provided a terrific breath of fresh air for comics creativity.

Below is a link to a cover I did for “Small Press Comics Explosion” in 1986. As you may be aware, SPCE was THE place back then where anyone who was self-publishing comics advertised their publications for sale. The amount of new material that was being generated each month was huge, and “mainstream” comics publications like TCJ (which is what folks like me considered them in 1986), while they were pretty good about covering some of what was going on, seemed generally unaware of just how big the self-publishing movement was getting until later.

I agree with Jack and Russ. What TCJ should have done was ignore super hero comic books completely. Making snide remarks about super hero comics is just as much as waste of space as positive mentions of them.

Russ, that was the only issue of “Small Press Comics Explosion” I ever owned or saw, and I loved it and the cover! I got it when I was in seventh grade (I’m 38) because my dad would sometimes stop in a comics store near his job and randomly buy something for me. Apparently your cover caught his eye. I vividly remember sitting in English class, thinking about that magazine, and fantasizing about becoming a small press cartoonist and hanging out with all my new, cool comics friends.

Jack wrote: “Part of the magazine’s late-80s/early-90s spirit was probably due to its excitement about the first wave of alternative comics.”

Yeah, that was a huge part of it. But there was also a feeling that this new thing was a hothouse flower beset by dangers all around–an indifferent (if not hostile) comics reading public, a disdainful retail environment, a distribution system that had no idea what to do with this stuff, and a general public that when they thought of comics at all, thought of comics as something some kind of collectible “investment” (Yech–I’m glad that passed). So we were prickly and defensive and a bit fanatical in supporting what we liked. Asking us to cover a lot of mainstream stuff at that time would be like asking Rolling Stone magazine to put Bobby Goldsboro on the cover in 1968. At least, that’s how we saw it.

Russ: “I was heavily involved with the small press movement of the 1980s, and yes, the self-publishing boom from that period provided a terrific breath of fresh air for comics creativity.”

The Comics Journal running Dale Luciano’s “Newave Comics Survey” in 1985 was hugely inspirational to me. It certainly helped inspire “Minimalism”. (The main inspiration was that we were sent dozens of minicomics every week and I had no idea what else to do with them.)

Robert, the amazing thing is that Groth & Co. triumphed 100%. Remember Gary’s angry editorials about the Harlan Ellison Playboy article citing Fish Police as an outstanding example of adult comics? He was also furious about a New Yorker essay that compared Maus to the Green Lantern/Green Arrow drug comics. Nowadays, there’s no way in hell that Playboy or The New Yorker would run anything like those pieces; every non-stupid cultural publication more-or-less recognizes TCJ’s view of comics as the right one.

What fascinated me about the whole movement is that it blossomed and grew exponentially off of most comic book collectors’ radar.

The only reason I was attuned to it was because I was heavy into fanzines and early alternative comics during the 1970s, and always kept one foot in that world even after joining the USAF in 1978. I knew Corrigan from our days as cover artists for “The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom,” and our days as ‘zine publishers during the 1970s, and when I got wind of the growing “small press” self-publishing movement circa 1984-1985, I noticed Corrigan was one of the movement’s biggest advocates. It was like deja vu all over again, and I started ordering self-published comics by the carload shortly after being assigned to Kadena Air Base, Japan, in 1985. So, while I missed out on comic book store stuff like “Love and Rockets” and “Watchmen,” I was having a blast reading the latest installment of “Bird Comics,” “Dishman,” “Stupid Boy,” “Slam Bang,” “Misc!” and “Stuff.”

I just realized I have more copies of Steve Willis’ self-published “Morty the Dog” comics from the mid-1980s than I do the comic book versions of “Love and Rockets,” “Watchmen,” and “Cerebus” COMBINED.

I don’t know about that. I think it was specific books that triumphed, not the Journal‘s view of things. Maus didn’t need the Journal. Watchmen obviously didn’t need it, nor did Fun Home, Sandman, and Persepolis. The adulatory coverage of Chris Ware didn’t hurt Jimmy Corrigan, but I don’t think it was central to that book’s success in the larger world, either. The real contribution Gary and Co. made with that book was publishing the serialization, and that’s Fantagraphics, not TCJ.

Gary’s rebuttal of Ellison’s Playboy article was more about his ongoing poo-toss at Ellison than anything else. There’s a really hilarious bit in there where he refutes Ellison’s assertion that competition from independent publishers pressured Marvel and DC to clean up their acts a bit. Gary’s argument was exactly the one Jim Shooter would have made in response. Ironically, I think Ellison was just parroting what Gary was saying in his anti-Shooter editorials.

I don’t remember the New Yorker review of Maus being anywhere near as bad as Gary made it out to be. The writer was fatuous at times, such as the bit where he treated Maus as the culmination of a trend in adult themes started by the superhero relevance stories of the early ’70s. Most of the review, though, was pretty standard. My biggest problem with it was that it was just so yawningly predictable from beginning to end.

@Robert Stanley Martin. It was specific books that triumphed but part of what made that triumph possible was the novel argument that comics could be an adult medium capable of telling long form stories. TCJ was the major publication that advocated that position in the 1980s, and gave it credibility by publishing bracing comics criticism. TCJ wasn’t the source of that idea — it had its roots in the underground comics, the fan writers like John Benson in the 1960s, and the ideas of Eisner and Spiegelman & Mouly in the 1970s. Still, in the 1980s, there was no more tireless advocate of that position than TCJ.
What needs to be appreciated is that publications like the New Yorker and the New York Times rarely come up with innovative ideas, but rather provide post-facto validation for thoughts that first emerged in more specialized publications. Examples would include modernism (championed in publications like The Dial before being institutionalized) or abstract expression (championed in The Nation and Partisan Review by Clement Greenberg before being accepted by bigger publications) or the auteur theory (which circulated in Cahiers du Cinéma and other specialized publications before becoming part of mainstream discourse).
Specialized publications (whether Partisan review,Cahiers du Cinema or TCJ) serve both as the incubator of new critical thoughts and also hold mainstream publications accountable. A recent example being the way Tim Hodler’s mockery of the AV Club’s comic criticism led them to improve. In general, the level of comics criticism in mainstream publications is much higher than it was in 1970s and 1980s, and TCJ is part of the reason why.
I agree with Jack, by the way, that one of the high points of the Journal was the late 1980s/early 1990s, when the magazine carried a real polemical edge. In general, there has been a longstanding tension in the Journal between a desire to be catholic (covering comics in all its form) and being polemical (champion a certain form of comics). The periods where the Journal has been a bit too catholic have been kind of boring as far as I’m concerned.
At the risk of being self-serving, I think Hodler/Nadel have struck the right balance.

Jeet, if we all agree one way or the other that the Journal has essentially won the battle for comics as art, and that the kinds of comics it champions (Crumb, Spiegelman, Hernandez Bros., etc.) have wide mainstream acceptance, then what do you feel is the Journal’s polemical mission at the moment? I agree that it’s worthwhile to tell the AV Club not to print reviews of things they haven’t read…but that seems like a basic issue of professional standards, rather than a polemical mission per se.

Or do you feel that championing Chester Brown or Alison Bechdel or Jack Kirby is still an oppositional stance vis-a-vis mainstream publications?

The Ellison Playboy editorial (available at http://archives.tcj.com/2_archives/e_groth0189.html) is actually my favorite piece of Gary’s writing. It’s a perfect blend of his three defining characteristics as a writer–a deep knowledge of comics history, an angry contempt for mainstream culture, and a penchant for mean-spirited feuding.

I haven’t been following this thread at all, but this popped out in Google Reader:

“what do you feel is the Journal’s polemical mission at the moment?”

Personally, I don’t see the Journal as having a polemical mission anymore. It’s a news, reviews, interview, history magazine/site that covers comics. But it doesn’t feel like it’s trying to push any boundaries. It’s like old hippies that became congressmen.

I’m not of the view that comics-as-an-artform commands much more respect now than it ever did. Outside of the comics subculture, I don’t think anybody cares. What has generated interest are specific works. The six graphic-novel projects I mentioned have been the most successfully marketed to adult readerships outside the comics subculture, at least on their own merits. (The Dark Knight Returns owes its success to continuing interest in the Batman property; Bone is for the children’s-market; just about everything else was reliant on attention generated by movie adaptations.) TCJ can be said to have advocated for only two of these six–Maus and Jimmy Corrigan, and only the latter project may have enjoyed any real benefit from their attention.

As for your examples from other media, fiction and poetry didn’t need The Dial for validation, and painting didn’t need Clement Greenberg. They were advocates for movements within established fields, and those movements already had a great deal of behind-the-scenes interest and support. The Dial and Greenberg were surfing cultural waves that other publications and writers would have gotten on if they hadn’t been there.

Cahiers du cinema has got to be the single most overrated critical publication in the history of the arts. The filmmakers whose work was most responsible for the increased prestige of post-WWII filmmaking in North America and elsewhere were by and large not championed by the magazine. The six most prominent filmmakers of that period in terms of general regard were probably Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, De Sica, Antonioni, and Truffaut. Only De Sica and Truffaut can be said to be championed by the magazine, and De Sica’s reputation was well established by the time Cahiers began publishing in 1951. Claude Lelouch’s work, which the Cahiers writers absolutely despised, has probably done more to advance the prestige of film as an art form among the general public than–apart from Truffaut–all the contemporary filmmakers the Cahiers writers were championing combined.

Contrary to the belief of several, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, and Howard Hawks were generally considered the best sound-era directors in Hollywood by critics before Truffaut, Godard, and other early Cahiers writers had even hit puberty. The Cahiers writers were the first to treat these directors in an atmosphere of incense-burning, but that did more to falsify those directors’ work than anything else. The aesthetic values of the early Cahiers writers, such as their prizing of directors who make the most accomplished use of the long take, are not something one sees much among critics who came afterward in general-audience publications. Most critics over the last few decades praise films by Woody Allen–a long-take master–for different reasons than the post-Cahiers auteurist writers.

Cahiers developed a mystique around movie fanboys due to Truffaut and Godard’s moving from criticism to filmmaking. (“One day that could be me!”) I see little indication that many of those fanboys ever took much interest in the actual criticism that they wrote. The interest Cahiers and disciples such as Andrew Sarris fostered in older Hollywood directors allowed aspiring critics to get their feet wet with easily available and not terribly challenging work, but as I said, the aesthetics being promoted by auteurists were not what people were taking away from those films.

The quality of criticism improves–both with comics and elsewhere–because the quality of the work being discussed has improved, not because the prior existence of a magazine that deals with the field on the margins. If you’re going to convincingly make that argument, you’re going to have to demonstrate an actual influence by Groth, Fiore, et al., in terms of aesthetic values. Taking comics seriously as an aesthetic medium doesn’t count. It’s too broad, and the two efforts that were by far the most central to that value shift–Maus and Watchmen–clearly didn’t get there because of anything the Journal published.

What I meant to say was that TCJ’s once-marginalized view of comics as art triumphed 100%. I don’t think the magazine itself ultimately played a huge role in making that happen, although Fantagraphics definitely did, and TCJ probably gave comfort and inspiration to many struggling alternative cartoonists in the 80s and 90s.

I don’t know how anyone can deny that that comics-as-an-artform commands much more respect now than it ever did. Comics is sure respected in all the upper-middle-class-white-liberal media outlets that I like–NPR, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, etc.

Surely it doesn’t have to be a one-thing-or-the-other issue? Even if you’re only willing to give the Journal some credit for Chris Ware’s success, that still seem pretty important. And what about folks like Clowes and the Hernandez Bros? And the Journal just seems so important for people who write about comics in general.

I think there’s always a back and forth between critics and art and audience. TCJ helped create an audience and a fandom for a group of literary comics…not just the biggest guns, like Maus, but stuff with a lower profile, like Chester Brown. There was a subculture that nourished those things, and TCJ was part of that, surely.

Actually, I guess you can argue that TCJ gave birth to Fantagraphics the publisher, which didn’t exist until the Hernandez Brothers sent their work to TCJ and Gary asked to publish it. So maybe comics as art really does have TCJ as its lovably irascible grandparent. To truly gauge the magazine’s impact, we’d have to go back in time and murder Gary before he could purchase The Nostalgia Journal (or we could purchase it ourselves but murder him anyway).

There were lots of folks (including me) trying to make the comics-are-serious-as-an-asthetic-medium argument long before Groth and Company entered the scene. But what TCJ did, and why folks like me embraced it, is because they took on that fight much more visibly, forcefully and with more fundamental journalistic solidity than virtually any other widely-read comics publication of that era. And thus it did not take long for TCJ to become the de facto surrogate spokesman for those of us who honestly believed the assertion that comics-as-art had validity.

That old hippy comment probably came off harsher than I meant it. I was just lacking for a good metaphor. I still read the Journal and enjoy a good bit of it (admittedly, I found the last paper issue mostly boring, no one needs that much on Crumb… ever… please).

“Do you feel there are boundaries it should be pushing, Derik?”

That’s hard to answer without coming down to personal taste, I think. They are pretty good about covering a range of comics (style, format, etc.) They could be better on international content (though I suspect a lot of that is a lack of contributors and language barriers).

I really think it’s just a case where the broader argument that TCJ used to be making has been made. Bif Bam Pow comics aren’t just for kids anymore.

Personally, I think the most telling what-if event would have been Fantagraphics publishing that announced Harlan Ellison-Michael Kaluta The Shadow graphic novel, which got derailed because financial problems forced Gary to recall the advance money he paid Ellison to write it. If Fantagraphics had been better capitalized back then, they might be more like what Dark Horse is now than what they actually became.

Robert: “If Fantagraphics had been better capitalized back then, they might be more like what Dark Horse is now than what they actually became.”

I have my doubts about this. The defining moment for Fantagraphics was publishing L&R (and then porn). The defining moment for Dark Horse was publishing Dark Horse Presents and then Concrete and then Aliens. They both tried their hands at the Euro translation biz – Dark Horse landed up with the Heavy Metal-like Cheval Noir which gave us early translations of Schuiten and Peeters (just like Heavy Metal) and also half-dressed Dave Stevens’ ladies on its first issue cover. Fantagraphics had Sinner and Graphic Story Monthly which had Tardi on its first cover. Its flagship anthology of the time was Prime Cuts (?) which was decidedly not Dark Horse Presents and predictably enough, failed to do the biz.

When was this Ellison-Kaluta Shadow due out? Ellison wasn’t a particularly good comics writer as far as I can tell. He did a very mediocre Batman with Gene Colan iirc. Fantagraphics did manage to get that horrible BWS Ad Astra book out several years later.

I think Noah’s measured take seems reasonably accurate for the most part.

I was being a little facetious about FB turning into Dark Horse had things gone differently. However, in the early 1980s, they were certainly looking into doing independent projects with the better mainstream comics talents. The Ellison/Kaluta Shadow book, had everything gone to plan, would probably have come out in 1982.

I don’t know the behind-the-scenes story, but they were also involved with the Bernie Wrightson-illustrated Frankenstein edition that Marvel published in 1984. FB did the typesetting for the book. I can’t for the life of me figure why Marvel would have contracted with them to do that, though. Marvel was perfectly capable of typesetting the book themselves, FB didn’t offer those services to outside publishers, and the antipathy between the companies by that time was such that you’d think it would have derailed any deal.

I think Noah’s take is reasonable, too. TCJ, for all its flaws, certainly helped to reinforce the shifting perception of the field. I just wouldn’t give them credit for it beyond that. The real credit belongs to the creators and their books.

“Claude Lelouch’s work, which the Cahiers writers absolutely despised, has probably done more to advance the prestige of film as an art form among the general public than–apart from Truffaut–all the contemporary filmmakers the Cahiers writers were championing combined.”

Claude Lelouch is one of the biggest hacks from that time period. “A Man and a Woman” is derided (in the unlikely event it’s mentioned) even to this day. There’s no past tense when it comes to critical consensus for him. What kind of advancement has he made for the form? I think directors like Sam Fuller, Nicholas Ray and Anthony Mann are much better known and appreciated these days. Lelouch is a footnote. Admittedly I’ve only seen “A Man and a Woman” and “Un homme qui me plaît (Love is a Funny Thing),” and snatches from that movie he made ten years ago with Jeremy Irons. Judging from the latter, even to this day he’s making movies that are perfect fits for PBS fundraisers. Maybe that’s what the general public wants, but why should anyone care about that? Lelouch’s prestige is the same as Todd McFarlane’s prestige- absolutely false.

Why is Dark Horse Comics a model to look up to? Does the world need more Star Wars comics? Aside from manga, Cheval Noir and some Moebius graphic novels, Dark Horse’s art bona fides are close to zilch.

And put me in the complete anti-superhero camp for TCJ. They did have regular coverage in the back ages off and on for years, at any rate. Any more than that and it would’ve been like Harpers or the New Yorker covering Harlequin novels.

…I don’t remember the New Yorker review of Maus being anywhere near as bad as Gary made it out to be. The writer was fatuous at times, such as the bit where he treated Maus as the culmination of a trend in adult themes started by the superhero relevance stories of the early ’70s. Most of the review, though, was pretty standard. My biggest problem with it was that it was just so yawningly predictable from beginning to end.
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Being The New Yorker, I’m hoping at least it didn’t lead with “Bang! Pow! Comics Aren’t for Just Kids Anymore!”

Yet, when mainstream publications — even ones as usually outstanding as The New York Review of Books — have people who might be knowledgeable about written literature, yet ignoramuses about the comics art form, writing about comics, what you get is, at best, mediocre and unperceptive.

Imagine someone who’s a “name,” with heavy lit-cred, writing a review of a Beethoven concert: “Sometimes the music is quiet, sometimes it’s loud. The composer also varies the pace…” (“Oooh! Perceptive!“)

And that’s the equivalent of the kind of insultingly noxious crapola that the mainstream public reads, when non-knowledgeable people write about a field they understand in only the most shallow fashion.

Or how about how the idiotic NPR’s noxious Ray Suarez led off a story about how comics were now adult with a reading from the painfully embarrassing sub-Mickey-Spillane Sin City. Yeah, that shows how comics are now being sophisticated, Suarez…

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Jeet Heer says:

…It was specific books that triumphed but part of what made that triumph possible was the novel argument that comics could be an adult medium capable of telling long form stories. TCJ was the major publication that advocated that position in the 1980s, and gave it credibility by publishing bracing comics criticism. TCJ wasn’t the source of that idea — it had its roots in the underground comics, the fan writers like John Benson in the 1960s, and the ideas of Eisner and Spiegelman & Mouly in the 1970s. Still, in the 1980s, there was no more tireless advocate of that position than TCJ.

What needs to be appreciated is that publications like the New Yorker and the New York Times rarely come up with innovative ideas, but rather provide post-facto validation for thoughts that first emerged in more specialized publications…Specialized publications (whether Partisan review,Cahiers du Cinema or TCJ) serve both as the incubator of new critical thoughts and also hold mainstream publications accountable. A recent example being the way Tim Hodler’s mockery of the AV Club’s comic criticism led them to improve. In general, the level of comics criticism in mainstream publications is much higher than it was in 1970s and 1980s, and TCJ is part of the reason why….
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R. Maheras says:

…There were lots of folks (including me) trying to make the comics-are-serious-as-an-asthetic-medium argument long before Groth and Company entered the scene. But what TCJ did, and why folks like me embraced it, is because they took on that fight much more visibly, forcefully and with more fundamental journalistic solidity than virtually any other widely-read comics publication of that era. And thus it did not take long for TCJ to become the de facto surrogate spokesman for those of us who honestly believed the assertion that comics-as-art had validity.
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Excellently put, and solidly argued.!

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Robert Stanley Martin says:

I’m not of the view that comics-as-an-artform commands much more respect now than it ever did. Outside of the comics subculture, I don’t think anybody cares. What has generated interest are specific works.
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Well, if “specific works” get tons of positive coverage and critical acclaim in the mainstream media, isn’t that giving people the message that, though most of comics may be aesthetic drek (or at least simpleminded fare), that comics is an artform where serious, worthy work can be regularly created?

Therefore putting comics in the same ballpark as novels and movies, where most of what’s coming out is simplistic entertainment, but Art can still be produced.

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Derik Badman says:

Personally, I don’t see the Journal as having a polemical mission anymore. It’s a news, reviews, interview, history magazine/site that covers comics. But it doesn’t feel like it’s trying to push any boundaries…
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Yes, indeed so. Aside from inweighing for more respect/rights for creators against corporations…

I’m not defending A Man and a Woman critically. I like it, but I think it’s a glib, flashy effort. But it was an enormous international success, both critically and commercially, when it was released in 1966. It was one of the handful of European “art-house” films, along with La Dolce Vita and a few others, to become a hit with general audiences. According to Wikipedia, its box office earnings in North America alone was $14 million, which is the equivalent of about $100 million today. Here is a list of the prizes it won:

If you’re marketing films for art-house audiences, you can only dream of a list like that.

The kind of crossover success enjoyed by A Man and a Woman is of enormous benefit to the prestige of a field as a whole, regardless of one’s individual opinion of the piece as an audience member.

By the same token, a lot of the comics-as-art crowd is very suspicious of Watchmen, Sandman, Persepolis, and Fun Home for various reasons, and others of reasonable critical intelligence have issues with Maus and Jimmy Corrigan, but I think everyone can agree all of these books have done a great deal to improve the profile of the medium.

“Prestige” is a highly subjective term. Even if for that one year that film received praise, over the long term it’s been rightly derided. It just proves the usual cluelessness of the mainstream audience. Popular success means absolutely nothing.

Popular success enables future work. It’s very important in any field.

If you’re trying to expand a niche market, a success like A Man and a Woman‘s means a hell of a lot. It opens the door for other material from that niche, and if that’s successful, too, it opens that door even further.

One of the problems North American distributors of foreign films had in the 1960s was that they couldn’t get theaters outside of the big cities and college towns to carry them. A Man and a Woman‘s success was a godsend. It helped open the door for Blow-Up and Belle de jour. Those weren’t as successful, but they did well enough to open the door further for Stolen Kisses and My Night at Maud’s and The Conformist, etc., etc. A Man and a Woman helped build a larger audience for foreign pictures in the U. S. Film snobs may hate it, but I’ve found that subculture hard-liners dislike crossover material more often than not.

In defense of Lelouch, he had more formal sophistication than 99.9 % of the filmmakers working at the time. A Man and a Woman looks far more imaginative and accomplished than all but a handful of the pictures that were contemporaneous with it. Lelouch’s sophistication is glib rather than expressive, but artists who wear their ability on their sleeve are often a much better introduction to a field than those who don’t. It’s a lot easier to sell Orson Welles as a film artist to a novice than Jean Renoir. That novice may eventually prefer Renoir’s work–I certainly do–but it’s far more of an acquired taste. An audience for an art has to start somewhere, and Lelouch is a pretty good director to do that with, even if he’s viewed dismissively later on.

I don’t know that A Man and a Woman has been derided so much as time has just passed it by. Most work is here today and gone tomorrow in the cultural consciousness. That doesn’t mean the work is bad. However, if one enjoys pre-counterculture ’60s styles–and a lot of people who are into Mad Men, for example, are finding that they do–I recommend it. It’s nothing profound, but it’s a lot of fun to watch.

Nothing wrong with being a film snob, comics snob, or music snob. Or literature snob for that matter. I think anyone who has cultivated any kind of taste has that side to them. That wasn’t really the best word choice in my comment. I apologize to anyone I might have pissed off with that. I do like “subculture hard-liner,” though.

Popular, Popular, Unpopular!
‘You’re no Poet’ — the critics cried!
‘Why?’ said the Poet. ‘You’re unpopular!’
Then they cried at the turn of the tide —
‘You’re no Poet!’ ‘Why?’ ‘You’re popular!’
Pop-gun, Popular and Unpopular
!
–Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“One of the problems North American distributors of foreign films had in the 1960s was that they couldn’t get theaters outside of the big cities and college towns to carry them”

Plus ça change. It’s always been a struggle. In reality, there were many movies over a period of years that helped open up the foreign film market, as small as it was. Earlier Bergman helped as well as many others. Can’t say I was there for “A Man and a Woman,” but I’ve never heard or read anyone else credit it for being a supposed lifesaver. It’s as middle of the road as you can get.

James — I dug out a scan I did of my other cover for “Small Press Comics Explosion” (#8, Jan 1987) because I wanted to illustrate what I was talking about regarding how the definition of the term “minicomic” has changed from a format, circa the mid-1980s, to a generic term now that describes ALL self-published comics.

If you’ll notice, the small publisher on the left is holding digest-sized self-published comics. The gigantic guy on the right is holding minicomic-sized self-published comics. I played off the juxtaposition of format sizes against character sizes as a gag — a gag that might confuse a young self-publisher today. He/she would probably look at the drawing and think, “I don’t get it — all self-published comics are minicomics.”